7th Annual Santa Barbara Marathon Cancelled by Organizers on October 14th

Organizers of the Santa Barbara Veterans Day Marathon and Half Marathon announced this past Wednesday, October 14th, that the 7th Annual Santa Barbara Marathon has been canceled, but the Half Marathon is still good to go.

I didn't like the way they said it "We have made the difficult decision to consolidate our events into the Half Marathon." That sounds like something a corporate PR department would say about a shutting down some company operations. Why not just say "we cancelled the marathon"  but the half marathon is still running? I don't know.

This is unfortunate to hear. It is too bad that they waited until not even a month before the event to cancel it, but that happens. Last year's full marathon garnered only 859 participants, down from 1092 in 2013 and 1375 in 2012. The year I ran it, 2009, there were 1685 finishers.  (Thank you MarathonGuide.com for making these results so easily accessible!)

My inaugural Santa Barbara International Marathon t-shirt is still around, though getting a bit dingy.

This is not the first local marathon to call it quits. The Malibu Marathon ditched the full marathon and retained its half marathon in 2014.

One Injury Leads to Another and to Another , Then Things Get Better

It has been 6 weeks since my last update here, a month and a half of ups, downs, more downs, now possibly thing are looking up. I hope. I think.

Once you have one injury, if you don't address it properly, it's possible it can lead to other injuries. After developing soreness in what I thought way my upper left hamstring (since debunked by my chiropractor - explained later),  I chose to keep running through the pain, which was fairly moderate, but annoying.

So I was running with a bum right knee and a sore what my chiropractor subsequently told me is my piriformis muscle. But one night, while running with my older son's cross country team, less than 10 days after my race, I decided to "open it up" a bit. I started really slow but I started to work into a groove and sped it up with another parent.

After a few miles of showing up the kids, I felt a twinge in my left calf area, kept running, then a more distinct pain that ultimately stopped me in my tracks.

My piriformis issue was still there and I was overcompensating by running on my toes more and developed a third issue.

I took some Advil, iced it quite a bit that night, and went out for a run the next morning, very slowly. And I kept doing my daily runs very slowly for several weeks. It didn't feel good, but I've run through plenty of injuries in the past.

But...that wasn't working for me this time. It got worse and worse, particularly the calf issue. So I forced myself to take off 8 straight days of running.

The 8 days ended on Monday. I ran very hesitantly on Tuesday and felt ok. Today it felt even better. Rest. Try it. It works.

So in the meantime, I still have the soreness in my piriformis muscle, a muscle that starts at the lower spine and connects to the thighbone, behind the glutes. It runs diagonally and the sciatic never muscle runs vertically beneath it.

My Foam Roller

Today I asked my chiropractor if my hamstring stretches are good to do. I generally do the hurdler's type stretch and the standing hamstring stretch where you put your leg on a bench or something and bend toward the food. He said....NO, NO, NO. Those are not good to do and aren't even that effective.

I asked him what I should do then. Other than icing the area, one thing he mentioned was pressing a tennis ball into the area to work it a bit. I have a foam roller contraption too that I will be rolling my rear on more frequently to get the blood circulating in that area.

In the meantime, no races planned. I don't like to commit to a race when I'm running injured.